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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

CAD Manager Control Utility for AutoCAD 2008

The CAD Manager Control Utility has been updated for AutoCAD 2008. It is also still backward compatible with AutoCAD 2007.
The Search Results tab of InfoCenter can be configured to display content from various sources, such as the product Help system, CAD Manager Channels, or the Internet. You can specify whether users who install from the deployment can customize access to their InfoCenter search locations. The following file formats are supported: xml, doc, chm, html, htm, pdf and xml. This is a great way for the CAD Manager to add the CAD Manuals and other useful documents so they are easily accessed.
The search locations are saved in the registry at this location.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R17.1\ACAD-6001:409\CadManagerControl\Infocenter\SearchResults
The CAD Managers dream has come true. Enable CAD Manager Channels. Controls the display of the CAD Manager Channels in InfoCenter. Aside from being able to toggle CAD Manager Channels, you can also define the CAD Manager feed location and set the display name for the CAD Manager Channel. Enable RSS Feeds. Users can subscribe to any number of RSS feeds. Each feed is contained within a discrete InfoCenter category. Additionally, you can specify whether users can add RSS feeds.Customer Involvement Program (CIP) is also a new thing. As CAD Manager you should consider if you want to allow your users to participate or not. A lot of data is sent to Autodesk's servers. Don't worry. My suggestion is that you do participate. Check out here what CIP is.
Something that is not possible with this utility is to edit the RSS feeds or add new ones as well as specify what AutoCAD Help files should be included in a search.
If you want to hack some xml take a look at this file.
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2008\R17.1\enu\Support\infocenter.xml
Notice that you need to set the item id correct and follow the general syntax overall to have it working.